by on February 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

A Perfect Storm Hits Public Schools

Guest Post by Steven Sellers Lapham

Note: Steven Sellers Lapham and Jack Hassard worked together on this post.

Public schools in America are under attack from many directions, and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) seems bent on delivering a lethal one-two-three punch. This decade will likely witness more neighborhood schools shutting down, crowded classrooms, excellent teachers fired, and children fobbed off to “online learning programs.” Let’s recall that Prince Edward County, Virginia closed its schools 1959-64, creating a “lost generation” of children who were hobbled, as adults, by years of missed education. Today, a school district in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, cash strapped and unable to pay its teachers, is being kept open only by a federal court order.

We now face the prospect of a school closing because the local tax base has withered, the state government is under water, and the federal government has deemed the school to be unworthy of aid due to lackluster scores on high-stakes student tests. ED, which should be the strongest defender of public schools, is making the problem worse.

Punch #1: Punish the Poor.

The slogan “Race to the Top” is social Darwinism at its most ugly: Reward those who are doing well (inevitably, schools in wealthier neighborhoods) and punish those who are struggling (predictably, schools in America’s poorer neighborhoods). A child in Oklahoma, Mississippi, or North Dakota should not have to rely on a state administrator’s clever grant-writing skills in order to receive a good education. Certainly, some grant monies should be available for innovation and experimentation in schools. But to make “success” the guiding star of educational policy is wrong.

Punch #2: Death by Paperwork.

States might avoid the draconian punishments of the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB) by applying to ED for a “waiver.” The mad rush is on. To date, eleven states have submitted a “flexibility report.” Georgia’s is 249 pages. California estimates that enacting all of the waiver requirements (unfunded mandates) would cost at least $2 billion and has declined to apply. ED could make the waiver process useful by placing a 1,000-word limit on applications (a bit longer than this essay) and asking only for a brief description of a state’s educational goals. This would free up teachers and administrators to do real work.

Punch #3: Absurd Metrics.

Teacher evaluations will be based on “student growth.” There is, however, no scientific basis for doing this. The practice contradicts a 2011 National Academy of Science report, “Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education.”

Using test scores to measure the efforts of teachers is a pseudoscience akin to phrenology of the 1800s, which purported to measure one’s intelligence according to the shape of one’s skull. It also brings to mind journalists and social scientists of the 1920-60s who misued prison statistics to “prove” that black people are genetically inclined toward criminal behavior.  In his Harvard University Press book, Khalil Gibran Muhammad established how a racial and racist, ‘scientific’ discourse promoted this idea.  Today, we use high-stakes test scores to “prove” that embattled schools are “failures,” and that hard-working professionals aren’t working hard enough.

There are many reasons why student test scores might not mount endlessly upward, such as an influx of non-English speaking immigrants; a rise in divorces; the town’s factory closes; family transience; a rise in home foreclosures; a sad absence of parents, who are serving in Afghanistan; etc. Or maybe the for-profit company that created the test got a little sloppy when it wrote the test questions, skewing the results. These powerful influences cannot be adequately controlled in a statistical analysis on the small scale of a single school district, a single school, and least of all, a single teacher.

Pushing Back

We must ban the use of standardized tests to make high-stakes decisions of any kind. Standardized test scores might be used ethically as a diagnostic tool (“Apply first aid here!”), but never as an excuse for punishment (“Bleed the patient dry!”). As a study by Fairtest has revealed, the system has placed an inhumane burden on teachers and administrators on the ground, resulting in cheating scandals in 32 states and the District of Columbia. Valerie Strauss reports that the “misuse of standardized tests mandated by public officials has created a climate in which increasing numbers of educators feel they have no choice but to cross ethical lines.”

Of course, teachers, like any professional group, should be evaluated and held to high standards. Experienced teachers and administrators in the school itself have personal knowledge of the teacher, students, local community and curriculum. Peer observation and evaluation have been a part of healthy educational settings for centuries. There are rigorous protocols for teacher evaluation provided by professional and subject-discipline associations. Let’s use those.

In New York State, 1,200 principals (and even more teachers) have signed a letter protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate their job performance. California, with more public school students than any other state, has jumped ship. So has Pennsylvania, apparently. “The emphasis on testing under the waiver plan is as heavy-handed as it has been under NCLB,” said educational historian Diane Ravitch, who served as assistant secretary of education.

Replacing NCLB with a new law could propel our nation’s educational standing. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s most cherished goal is to return the United States to first place in the percentage of the population who graduate from college. To do that, let’s provide every child who could benefit from daycare with free admission to Head Start, which is the most powerful predictor of success for children born into poverty. Then we can strive to make every school in every neighborhood in America a center of excitement and excellence, not just the chosen few.

Until Congress passes a new federal education law, ED can write its rules and marshal its resources to assist students, teachers, and schools – and stop punishing them. And it can adopt a new slogan to match this new ethic. How about “Raise All Boats!”

Have the Federal Government’s education acts (No Child Left Behind and the Race to the Top) created conditions that have led to the “perfect storm” hitting American education?  What do you think?

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– Steven Sellers Lapham is an editor at a nonprofit educational association. The opinions expressed are his own.

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by on January 25, 2012 4 Comments

Obama Says: Stop Teaching to the Test; Teach With Creativity and Passion

In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Obama included a section of his speech that focused on education, not only K-12, but he also challenged colleges and universities to be more creative about how they work with students, and as well as the hundreds of thousands of young students who are not yet American citizens, and “live every day with the threat of deportation.”

I want to focus on some of the comments that the President made in his address.  Keep in mind that I believe that President Obama is struggling with how to deal with education because the policies of the U.S. Department of Education (ED) conflict with some of core beliefs that I quoted in a letter to the President that I posted here.  In his book Dreams from My Father, President Obama talked about his desire to become involved with the public schools in Chicago.  Here is the quote and the context of what I believe represents his core beliefs about students and learning:

I want to recall a section in that chapter for my readers that was very powerful, and supports the humanistic paradigm that I am proposing here. You and your colleague & friend Johnnie had decided to visit a high school, and the principal of the school introduced you to one of the school counselors, Mr. Asante Moran. He was, according to the principal, interested in establishing a mentorship program for young men in the school.

In his office, which was decorated with African themes, you discovered that Mr. Moran had visited Kenya 15 years earlier, and he indicated that it had a profound effect on him. In the course of your short meeting with Mr. Moran, he clearly told you that real education was not happening for black children, and then he offered you his view on what “real education” might be. Here is what he said on that Spring day in 1987:

Just think about what a real education for these children would involve. It would start by giving a child an understanding of himself, his world, his culture, his community. That’s the starting point of any educational process. That’s what makes a child hungry to learn—the promise of being part of something, of mastering his environment. But for the black child, everything’s turned upside down. From day one, what’s he learning about? Someone else’s history. Someone else’s culture. Not only that, this culture he’s supposed to learn is the same culture that’s systematically rejected him, denied his humanity (p. 158, Dreams from My Father).

Starting with the child as he or she is, and helping them connect to their environment—this is the core of humanistic teaching.  Most teachers know and try and act on this humanistic philosophy, but for many, it is an upstream battle.

The Department of Education is not a platform that suggests that learning should start with the child.  The cornerstone of the current Department of Education is the Race to the Top program and the new Waiver Program of the No Child Left Behind Act.  In these two programs, education for the child is a two-fold top down endeavor in which (1)  states must adopt a one-size fits-all set of standards (Common Core State Standards) that all children should attain regardless of where students live and (2) students must be subjected to high-stakes tests that will be used to determine their progress and graduation.  And to top it off, all states that want to continue to receive Federal funds through these two programs must use student achievement data to evaluate the effectiveness of teachers.

This approach has resulted in an educational system that is data driven so much so that it is in the best of interests of schools, administrators, and teachers to insist that  teaching to the test is a priority.  Remarkably the ED insists that states must tie student achievement scores to teacher evaluation, even when the prestigious National Academies of Sciences doesn’t think this is a good idea.  What we have seen is abusive behavior toward teachers resulting in psychological assaults, or what has become known as “teacher bashing.”

Did the President Open the Door?

Did President Obama, in his address last night, open the door to to a more creative approach to teaching?

In his address, the President made a few comments about teachers and teaching that might just reveal that he is interested in opening the door questioning some of the basic tenets of the ED.  Here are a few sentences from his address:

At a time when other countries are doubling down on education, tight budgets have forced states to lay off thousands of teachers.  We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.  A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.  Every person in this chamber can point to a teacher who changed the trajectory of their lives.  Most teachers work tirelessly, with modest pay, sometimes digging into their own pocket for school supplies — just to make a difference.

Teachers matter.  So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal.  Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones.  And in return, grant schools flexibility:  to teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.  That’s a bargain worth making.  (Emphasis mine).

For Obama to say that teachers should teach creativity, and stop teaching to the test is a remarkable statement give how the Department of Education is advocating high-stakes tests based on a common set of standards.  Many researchers would argue that continuing to use high-stakes tests will not result in teachers not teaching to the test.  Until high-stakes tests are banned from being used to make decisions about student learning and teacher performance, we will continue to be immobilized.

Did Obama open the door to altering the fixed and seemingly unchanging policies of NCLB and the Race to the Top?

I don’t know.  But if he would confer with Governor Brown of California, he might hear an alternate view.  California has rejected asking for a waiver on the NCLB act not only for the added billions it will cost, but because the deeper elements of NCLB and Race to the Top contradict some of Brown’s beliefs. He has stated that  principals and teachers know more about education, and that the testing syndrome that we have created not only takes a lot of time to administer (not to mention the cost), but appears to curb teachers creativity and engagement with students.

Diane Ravitch wrote about her recent her travels and speeches in California.  She wonders whether California will start a national revolt against bad ideas.  I do hope that Obama comes in contact with Brown, and California’s progressive superintendent of education.

 

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by on October 26, 2009 1 Comment

The Race to the Top: Hold on, there!

For some reason I have become obsessed with reading about The Race to the Top, and how the present U.S. Department of Education will use these funds to reform education.  As with large scale efforts such as this one, achievement testing has become a central aspect of any program, projects, or effort suggested at the State or Local Education Agency (LEA).

One of the core concepts is that the Department wants to use student achievement test scores and results to evaluate the effectiveness of individual teachers, administrators and schools.  Aside from irking most teachers around the country, the idea is Not supported with scientific research.

Rick Biche, commented on a recent post, and pointed me to a “letter” written by the Board on Testing and Assessment (BOTA) of the National Research Council.  Thank you, Rick.  I’ve spent time reading the letter, and its implications for The Race to the Top administrators, and teachers.  I also followed your link to your website, and I’ve enjoyed exploring it.

Now, the letter in question is this.  It is entitled Letter Report to the U.S. Department of Education on the Race to the Top Fund, and as I said was authored by a committee of the Board on Testing and Assessment.  It’s important to keep in mind that the purpose of BOTA is raise questions about, and provide the guidance for judging, the technical qualities of tests and assessments and intended and unintended consequences of their use.

The letter will not make the top administrators of The Race to the Top Fund happy.

The Race to the Top Fund will require that the States use achievement tests to measure “growth” of students, and use this kind of data to assess teacher performance.  As most of us would agree, tests do play an important role in evaluating programs, innovations, and projects, but as the BOTA report says, an adequate evaluation calls for more than tests alone.  In fact, most evaluations “collect data” throughout the course of a project or, in this case an entire course taught by an individual teacher.  These evaluations would include both qualitative  and quantitative data.  The Race to the Top administrators want to use a single sit-down test as a measure of student academic performance, and within 72 hours, provide the feedback necessary to evaluate the teacher, administrator, or school. They’ve got to be kidding.

In this approach, the Department is trying to use a test as a way to isolate the performance impact of teacher, or administrator.  Here is what the BOTA letter says about this idea:

Prominent testing expert Robert Linn concluded in his workshop paper: “As with any

effort to isolate causal effects from observational data when random assignment is not feasible, there are reasons to question the ability of value-added methods to achieve the goal of determining the value added by a particular teacher, school, or educational program” (Linn, 2008, p. 3). Teachers are not assigned randomly to schools, and students are not assigned randomly to teachers. Without a way to account for important unobservable differences across students, VAM techniques fail to control fully for those differences and are therefore unable to provide objective comparisons between teachers who work with different populations. As a result, value-added scores that are attributed to a teacher or principal may be affected by other factors, such as student motivation and parental support.

The BOTA letter also raises issues about using large scale, high-stakes, summative tests as a way to provide feedback on teaching and learning.  To wit:

Tests that mimic the structure of large-scale, high-stakes, summative tests, which lightly

sample broad domains of content taught over an extended period of time, are unlikely to provide the kind of fine-grained, diagnostic information that teachers need to guide their day-to-day instructional decisions. In addition, an attempt to use such tests to guide instruction encourages a narrow focus on the skills used in a particular test—“teaching to the test”—that can severely restrict instruction. Some topics and types of performance are more difficult to assess with large-scale, high-stakes, summative tests, including the kind of extended reasoning and problem-solving tasks that show that a student is able to apply concepts from a domain in a meaningful way. The use of high-stakes tests already leads to concerns about narrowing the curriculum towards the knowledge and skills that are easy to assess on such tests; it is critical that the choice of assessments for use in instructional improvement systems not reinforce the same kind of narrowing.

And finally, another area that I will comment on that BOTA raised questions about the feasibility and soundness of using “common assessments” to make assessments across states in the same way that NAEP currently does.  As pointed out in the letter, there simply are too many variables that never can be controlled to allow administrators to make comparisons across states, and I would add across school districts, within a state.  And one other point here is that the US Department of Education wants to pursue assessments to incorporate “international benchmarking.”  Hold on, there!

Well, what do you think about this?  Do you think the US Department of Education will listen to to the comments made by the Board of Testing and Assessment of the National Research Council?  I hope they do.  But I am not holding my breathe.  What do you think?


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by on October 24, 2009 Leave a Comment

The Race to the Top: Some Thoughts

The U.S. Department of Education received about $100 billion ($100,000,000,000) from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  It’s an enormous amount of money that is going to given to the States.  $4.35 billion of this amount has been earmarked as The Race to the Top fund, and it is that part of Department’s program that I will focus on here.

If the money were distributed equally across the country, it would amount to a little more than $13.33 per citizen.  It would mean that the state of California would get slightly more than 10% of the money, or $489,333,333 (I consulted a website that provided population figures for all the states and multiplied by $13.33).  Wyoming would receive the least coming in at slightly more than $7 million.   But, of course, the money will not be distributed in this way; each state that chooses to go for the money, must submit a proposal (first round this December; second round next Spring), and they must, in the proposal, agree to the critieria that the U.S. Department of Education has established.

Although the Request for Proposals (RFP) for the Race is still not available to the States, the Department published details of the Race Fund in the Federal Register (Notice of Proposed Priorities).  I read it, and have summarized the priorities that will in effect couch how the various States prepare their proposals. By the way, the proposal must be submitted by the Governer of the State, and signed off by the Governor, the State’s chief school officer, and the president of the State board of education.

Of the long list of criteria, only two are absolute musts for a state proposal:

  • States must have been approved by the Education Department for stabilization funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (most already have been)
  • states must not have any laws in place barring the use of student-achievement data for evaluating teachers and principals.

The fundamental aim of the Race to the Top Fund is to ensure that states that receive funds take a systematic approach to educational reform.  Specifically, as stated in the Federal Register (July 29, 2009), to receive funding, the applicant state must meet this priority:

The State’s application must describe how the State and participating LEAs intend to use Race to the Top and other funds to implement comprehensive and coherent policies and practices in the four education reform areas, and how these are designed to increase student achievement, reduce the achievement gap across student subgroups (Priority 1).

Other priorities will be considered as proposals are evaluated.  But according to the Department’s documents, only the first priority (described above) will be required.  The others which follow will enable the various states to develop proposals unique to their goals for reform.  Here they are:

  • Priority 2: Emphasis on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).  This should include the offering of rigorous (emphasis mine) course of study in STEM; collaboration among experts in museums, universities, research centers, and other STEM-related partners.
  • Priority 3. Expansion and adaptation of Statewide longitudinal data systems.   The Department asks how the State plans to expand statewide longitudinal data systems to include or integrate data from special education programs, limited English proficiency programs, early childhood programs, human resources, finance, health, postsecondary, and other relevant areas, with the purpose of allowing important questions related to policy or practice to be asked and answered.
  • Priority 4. Coordination and vertical alignment.  In essence, this priority is to ensure that students exiting one level are prepared for success, without remediation, in the next.
  • Priority 5. School-level conditions for reform and innovation.  This priority is designed to encourage flexibility and innovation in selecting staff, implementing new daily schedules, awarding course credit to students on student performance, & providing comprehensive services to high-need students.

You will find a good summary in Education Week of how the Race to the Top will stress the use of test data to determine the effectiveness of any proposal or program at the State and LEA level.   In fact, there is a separate competition for $350 million of the Race Fund money to stimulate a movement to develop “common student assessments.”  As I mentioned in another post, these “common students assessments” will be linked to the development of “common-standards.”  Forty-eight states have signed on to this movement.

Clearly, there is a lot of money available for education.  But as you look closely at the details, it is evident that national tests, based on a set of common academic standards, will be used to establish the bar used to measure any program or project, and will be used to tie student achievement to teacher and school performance.   Trying to link student achievement to teacher effectiveness and salary has always raised a red flag for me.  I wrote about this in an earlier post (Is student achievement the measure of teacher effectiveness) in March, and called into question how student achievement data can be used as the measure of teacher effectiveness. Somehow, is should only be a part of the evaluation process.  Surely, there is more to school learning than achievement test results.

Nevertheless, the Race to the Top is here, and will be implemented.  What are some of your opinions about the Race Fund?  What race are we talking about here?  Is this a reformulation of No Child Left Behind?  Instead of not leaving anyone behind, we’ll all race forward?  What do you think?

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by on October 21, 2009 4 Comments

Will “Common Tests” Answer the Question: What knowledge is of most worth?

There was an article in the recent issue of Education Week entitled Experts to Weigh in on Common Tests.  They will have their chance to speak to U.S. Department of Education in Atlanta, Boston and Denver.

A bit of background.  Forty-eight of the 50 states have agreed to work together to develop “common academic standards”  in math and language arts.  In order to measure these standards, the Department of Education wants to develop a set of “common tests.”

The common academic standards will define what students should be able to master by the end of high school.  According to the Education Week article, grade-by-grade common standards will follow.  So the Department of Education wants to invest $350 million to solicit proposals to work out the details of “common tests.”

A little more background.  Last year the Department of Education received nearly $5 billion dollars from the economic-stimulus package passed by Congress.  Two programs have emerged that will be funded by this money.  The first is Race to the Top Fund, (Appropriation: $4,350,000,000) and the second is money to be used for Investing in Innovation grants (Appropriation: $650,000,000).

Both of these funding programs are designed to lead to “education innovation and reform” in four core areas (follow this link for more information):

  • Adopting internationally-benchmarked standards and assessments
  • Recruiting, developing, retaining, and rewarding effective teachers and principals
  • Building data systems that measure student success and inform teachers and principals how they can improve their practice; and
  • Turning around our lowest-performing schools

Funding in these two areas (Race to Top; and Innovation) will be aimed at these goals:

  • achieving significant improvement in student outcomes, including making substantial gains in student achievement, closing achievement gaps, improving high school graduation rates, and
  • ensuring that students are prepared for success in college and careers.

The article, and the links to the U.S. Department of Education website where The Race to the Top and Innovation Grants are described raise the question of “What knowledge of most worth.”  As soon as the Race to the Top was announced by Secretary Duncan, I was disappointed by the use of such a phrase, but even more so by the details of the goals of these two hugely appropriated programs.  It seems to me that the article that was in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that I referred to in my last post about mathematics education is right on target here as a criticism of the underlying goals of the Race to the Top, but also the effort underway to establish a set of “common standards.”  Given that we are starting in mathematics and language arts, it might be that Ken Sprague’s suggestion that we are simply developing math curriculum for math’s sake, and not taking into account how mathematics knowledge might be presented in a practical way.

For as long as I can remember as an educator, we have been engaged in developing state and national standards that try to answer the question: What knowledge is of most worth?

In an article by Thomas Friedman in the New York Times, he points out that our schools are in need of improvement, but he moves us in a different direction when thinking about improving schooling.  He said this:

So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.  Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing our schools as well as our banks.

Are these new efforts by the 48 states to develop a common set of standards, and the U.S. Department of Education to fund the development of “common tests” leading us in the right direction?  What role will entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity play in the new common standards?  Or will they?  What do you think?

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